


She Has A Dream

by myadamantiumheart



Series: The Grilled Cheese 'Verse [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Dissociation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-23
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-10-22 21:14:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10705248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/myadamantiumheart/pseuds/myadamantiumheart
Summary: Wanda has a dream.An interstitial short in the Grilled Cheese 'Verse.





	She Has A Dream

She has a dream.

In the dream, he does not know her- at least, she thinks that’s what’s happening, at first. He stares at her through blank eyes and frosted eyelashes, and his arm, usually hanging from his side with scar tissue tendons like a tree’s bark under her fingers, is gone. In its place are metal plates, waiting patiently for their owner to awake. He is cold, and still, and for a moment she thinks he’s gone altogether. But then Steve’s hand is on her shoulder, familiar arms pulling her back, and the glass that she can now see has been covering James retracts. 

“He’ll wake up, any moment,” Steve says, voice low, desperate, exhausted deep into his bones. “T’challa promised me.” 

Her hands- her hands are worn, but in the wrong places. They are not calloused from work. They are calloused like she’s been holding things too tightly for too long, thin scars across the palms and shaking fingers. Her legs feel more tired than her usual yoga might engender, and her hair is long, long, longer than it’s ever been. The last time it approached this length she was begging the visa officer to believe her, please, I promise I didn’t forge Tony Stark’s signature on that sponsorship paper. Steve tenses behind her and in the shining back panel of the pod that houses James, she can see that her face is both younger and older than it should be. Somehow, she knows that Steve was able to hear James wake up before she was able to see it, but Wanda doesn’t know how. 

He breathes. 

In, and out. In, and out. In, and- his eyes open. They’re greyer than she remembers. 

She has a dream- but is this the dream? Is this- a dream?

“Steve,” James says, his voice croaky, like a hermit who hasn’t spoken in months. He coughs once, twice, three times before his arms (the one that Wanda remembers holding her, and the one she doesn’t) reach up, and he levers himself out of the (coffin, no, no it’s not a coffin, but what is it-) and steps forward. 

“Bucky,” Steve is choking, his chest heaving slightly against Wanda’s back. She is thirty, she is James’ wife, so why does she feel like she’s not meant to be first in line? She steps back, almost involuntarily, and- Her full reflection, in the shining glass of the room around them hits her, as Steve hits James, folding him up in comforting arms. Her eyes feel tight and hot in her face and she blinks a few times, raising up her hand to touch her cheek. She looks like the Wanda that ate ramen in college, after two all nighters in a row. Her clothes are red and black and too smooth for anything she would have bought in college. Leggings and a tunic, her hair hanging down in waves, flat sandals and for a minute, every part of her vision is neon red, glowing and burning. 

“I’m not thirty,” she murmurs softly in surprise, before she turns back to Steve and Bucky, who’s now focusing his grey-grey-too grey eyes on her. 

“You’ve been here in my dreams,” he says, tilting his head to the side. His hair isn’t right, but it’s him, it’s the same James she wakes up next to every day. Or- does she?

“Of course I have,” Wanda says, without thinking about it. If there was anyone she might do that for- “Who else would it be?” Steve looks at her weirdly, but somehow James seems to understand. He steps forward, reaching out his unfamiliar hand to touch the edge of her shoulder. 

“I don’t know,” he says, a small smile skirting the edges of his mouth. “You were the only one who visited, Red.” Behind him, she can see Steve’s raised eyebrows, his own smile, that same look, the same one he’d had the day James proposed to her. The same one he’d had watching Sam carry a screaming, laughing Sasha around their backyard, when he and Sam had finally gotten their own house. The same smile, but- not the same Steve. She has a dream, but she’s not sure it’s a dream, so she smiles at James, reaching up to take his hand. 

“I think we’ll be good friends,” James says, squeezing her hand before he sets her adrift again, turning back to Steve and asking him where “the rest” are. Good friends, she thinks. So this must be a dream, because she woke up to James yesterday and he had kissed her forehead softly, wrapping her tighter in the soft blankets on their bed. 

“I could spend the rest of my life like this,” he’d said, so gently, breath like a tide against her neck in the darkness of their bedroom. This James doesn’t feel the same way. For a moment, she wonders if any James has felt the same way. The crow’s feet at the sides of her eyes don’t exist to crinkle up as she feels something pounding at the edges of her vision, struggling to get in. 

“We should go find T’challa,” Steve says, beckoning her to follow them as he lets James lead the way out of the room. “We have only a week before we need to move on the base in Spain.” 

Wanda has a dream, and then- she wakes up. 

“You didn’t know me,” Wanda says, her hand flat on James’ chest, her cheek tight against his shoulder, the same way they fell asleep. He mumbles something, pulling her closer, pressing a sleepy kiss against her mussed hair. 

“‘F course I know you,” he slurs, rubbing her back clumsily. “I married you.” 

But she still thinks about the dream until the sun creeps up, and the pitter patter of Sasha’s markedly growing feet comes to wake them up for Saturday pancakes. 

\--

She has the dream again- it is the same, but different, just like the James in this dream, just like the Steve and the Natasha. 

“We have to move faster, or Tony will get there before us,” Steve says, breaking through the cotton stuffing Wanda’s skull. His broad hands are sketching designs out on a glowing green flat screen set into the darkness of the big conference table. “It’s imperative we get the files and get out before he manages to respond.” Her muscles are tensed up. The pit of her stomach hurts, acid churning, the same way she used to feel before a match, back when she was still going to a dojo. She’s in the dream, but she’s not, and Steve looks at her as she clenches her fists around the armrests of her chair. “Anything to add, Wanda? You’re the only one who’s been to the museum before, anyway.” 

The museum, the museum, the museum- the Prado, that big galleria she and James had gone to on their honeymoon. Wanda can remember the way he’d shied back at the painting of Saturn, devouring his son. He had laughed at the fancy portraits, his thumb tracing her cheek as he pushed her hair behind her ear. 

“You would look lovely in lace and lilacs,” James had said, sketching out sayings like limericks to make her smile. The staircases were a shiny white, smaller than she had anticipated. The galleries were tall, heaven tall ceilings, and when he had twirled her under them, it felt like they might actually fly. 

“There aren’t very many points of entry that don’t seem- ill advised,” she finally decides. James looks at her, the barest glance, and she knows exactly how tight his shoulders are. The acid in her stomach rises until it’s burning beneath her sternum, burning a hole in her sternum, and any moment all of her secrets will spill out painfully on to the table. 

She is Wanda, but she’s not their Wanda, is she?

After Steve lets them go, tells them to rest up, to eat, that he will send the revised plans to their separate computers in their separate rooms, she follows James out of the room on instinct. It’s habit, to go where he goes, the way he, in her universe, in her dream- no. In her real life, in her waking life, would follow her. She follows him down the corridor, out to a balcony, as if.

And here, she laughs to herself, because she can’t tell if this is real, anymore. She can’t tell if what she woke up to was her real life, or if she is this Wanda, following this James who does not love her out into the oppressive humidity. 

She follows him out onto the balcony, as if in a dream. 

Where is Tony? Why are they trying to evade him? Her found-father, who had wept silent tears at her wedding, and taken her second dance. Where is Pepper, who had, in a barely wavering voice, toasted her with a delicate glass of sparkling Rosé? Where is Bruce, who had helped her and Pietro fix every technological difficulty at the store since they’d started it? And where is Pietro, who- is her other half?

“Is this a dream?” she asks James, before she can talk herself out of it. He looks at her the same way he had looked at her in the kitchen, the day she told him about why there would be no in-laws of the biological sort to come to the wedding. He looks at her the way he’d looked at her when his mother was in surgery, getting a pin put in a leg broken by a random car pile-up on 85. He looks at her, and he waits for a moment, breathing deep in his barrel chest beneath a well-worn rusty red henley. 

“If it is,” he says, reaching out a hand, pulling her a little closer and wrapping his arm around her until she can feel the vibrations of his words, “I think you should wake up.” 

She doesn’t wake up. 

Wanda can still feel the heat of the day, the humidity. She can hear his heartbeat loud against her forehead where it rests on his collarbone. His arm whirs slightly, and it joins the other, folding her up in a solid hug. 

“Sometimes I wish this was the dream, and I could go back to what I had in the cryo-tube,” James says, so softly she can hardly hear him. “We were happy, when you visited me, and we could sit in the sunshine without fear that someone might see us. I didn’t know you, when you first appeared, but I knew that you wouldn’t hurt me, and I knew that you were safe.” 

Wake up, wake up, wake up, she thinks, but nothing changes. James is so solid beneath her, he cannot possibly be the dream, he cannot possibly-

“What if this was the dream?” Wanda asks, gripping his shirt with her fingers, desperately, so tightly that she can feel her own fingernails through the thin fabric. 

“Then we would be lucky,” James says. 

And she hopes it is, because she cannot feel Pietro and she cannot feel Sasha. Thor is nowhere to be found, and everyone here looks haggard, the type of emotional exhaustion she cannot fix. She feels like a fire starting in a tinderbox, without the connection to James that she remembers. Steve does not light up when he sees her coming, and Tony cannot see her at all. Natasha is so sad- Clint is so uptight. They bear the scars of a life she cannot remember, and a life she would not choose. 

She has a dream, she has a dream, she has a dream, and then she wakes. 

Her eyes closed, James’ heartbeat the metronome beneath her, her breath shallow and slow- Wanda has a dream. She clenches her jaw, and squishes her eyelids together, and when she opens them, one life will be there before her and the other will be just a mirage that her brain has created while her body is quiet in the night. 

Wanda has a dream, and then-

She wakes. 

“It’s just a dream,” James says, his hand rubbing a circle between her shoulder blades. She opens her eyes, and looks up, and then she knows. She has a dream, and she knows- one reality can stay, and the other will pass. She wakes up, and she looks into his eyes, and then, Wanda knows. 

At least- one of them was not a dream. 

**Author's Note:**

> The ending is specifically ambiguous to keep you all guessing about where I'm going with the next big installment of the GCV- so feel free to ask questions, but I might not answer them!


End file.
